The Biden administration continues to harass whistleblowers, with independent journalist Steve Baker being one of the more "valuable" targets of the FBI and Department of Justice. Baker was present at the Capitol on J6 to cover the events of that day. Since then, he has been aggressively vocal and has been interviewed by the FBI. On August 7, Baker received a Grand Jury subpoena for the footage he captured on January 6.
Baker believes his open and pointed criticism of the Capitol Police, the DOJ, and the FBI has put a dangerous bullseye on his back. He has extensive footage from both inside and outside the Capitol. Not only has he been extremely vocal, he has written extensively about J6, investigating the details by combing through footage of the protest. He has been on too many podcasts to count, including a three-part, long-form interview with FBI Whistleblower Kyle Seraphin.
Baker's footage is "everywhere," he says. He is, therefore, a problem child for a government that seems to be working overtime to hide J6 footage and evidence. Storyful picked up his footage. Some of his footage was used in an HBO documentary on J6 and by the NYTimes. Baker's footage covering the extraction of Ashli Babbitt went viral online. Babbitt was a Trump supporter who was shot by Capitol Police Officer Michael Byrd. Baker believes he will ultimately be charged, despite having done, in his words, "no violence, property damage, or parading."
The August 7 subpoena for footage came after a long period of relative silence on the part of the DOJ. He appeared on Emerald Robinson to speak about his two-year-plus dealings with the DOJ and the FBI. He was also the featured speaker during a three-and-a-half-hour Twitter "X" Space on Monday.
There is a reason Baker says he "will no longer believe anything he hasn't seen with his own eyes." And the things he has seen with his own eyes make him doubly threatening to a DOJ that is desperate to silence contradictory accounts. Having attended in fall of 2022 the Oath Keepers' first trial in person, Baker says he saw firsthand how twisted the case against the Oath Keepers became, both inside and outside the courtroom.
Baker describes a defense that seemed to be winning with its evidence. However, when the government realized the defense's evidence was more compelling than they thought it would be, the prosecution turned up the heat. Government attorneys ran what Baker describes as a believable but untrue, comprehensive "psyop" that would shock even the most cynical people. He says the government made "patsies" out of the Oath Keepers.
Describing what he witnessed, Baker told UncoverDC:
"I watched the collusion between the government prosecutors and the judge to suppress evidence. They switched gears and came up with this whole concept of an implicit conspiracy. I watched the manipulation and creation of evidence out of whole cloth. I watched how they put on what was essentially a high-tech audio-visual psyop for the jury... pieced together narrative stories from online content, chats, and messages... things that had nothing to do whatsoever with January 6 to create this image that these guys were this radical militia, right-wing white supremacists who wanted to overthrow the government. Instead, the evidence showed they are anything but. In fact, they were the exact opposite of that."
Throughout their entire 13-year history leading up to January 6, the Oath Keepers had never in the thousands of operations and security operations and disaster recovery operations for which they've volunteered; they never once committed a single crime. All had volunteered their services for 13 years. They had never had one moment of violence that they had participated in. They had never had any charges of any kind ever filed against them.
Instead, the Oath Keepers go in, and 99% of the time, they are working directly with local law enforcement, including in DC, where they had been going to the rallies in advance of January 6. They would phone the Metro Police in advance, letting them know they were providing security.
The government made them the patsies of the event. The government called them the leaders of the insurrection—they were the tip of the spear. In truth, they were nothing of the sort. They weren't even there. They were nowhere near any of the breach points ever. It was absurd as I watched how they manipulated that court into this conclusion."
Baker continued by discussing the role the media seemed to play in the psyop. He saw legacy media concocting egregiously disingenuous tales about the trial. They selectively reported some of the facts of the case, omitting key information from their reporting. The "lies of omission," says Baker, made the stories fictional at best. It seemed to him to be a government set up to scapegoat and destroy what appeared to be an innocent group of men.
Baker was present during the Oath Keepers' trial and described what he discovered about the legacy media:
"Well, what I discovered in that trial and what was the very most eye-opening experience for me reading [mainstream media] articles in the evening and then the next morning. Many articles would come outward regardless of whether it was the New York Times, Washington Post, or CNN. Whatever the journalist—and it was not what they said. Everything that they reported in their articles was accurate. It was what they left out. They left out nearly half of the testimony that was taking place in that trial.
Had cameras been allowed in a federal courtroom, the American public would have known what was really taking place in that Oath Keepers' trial because, in fact, during the prosecution, the government's own direct presentation of their witnesses and such—the defense was winning. They were winning the argument every day. Now they weren't going to ultimately win with the DC jury. We know that that was a fait accompli going into the trial, to begin with, but they were winning.
Baker says that not a single outlet from conservative media was in the courtroom. "Instead, it was just my small voice there and a reporter from the Epoch Times. We just didn't have the reach to get out the truth of what was taking place. But really, the darkest part were the lies of omission that we were getting from the mainstream media is what they don't tell the public. That was really the darkness that goes on in that courtroom."
Fall 2021: FBI Threatens Charges of Interstate Racketeering
Baker has summarized the timeline of his interactions with the FBI and the DOJ. However, some highlights stand out. Number one, after his first contact with an FBI agent on July 22, 2021, it became obvious that the government was monitoring everything—his plans and whereabouts. He believes the monitoring continues to this day.
After some delays due to statutory requirements and the procedural permission required to interview a journalist, the agent set up a two-hour interview in the FBI's Raleigh office on October 18, 2021. Baker volunteered to give the FBI his J6 footage, but they have never requested any of it. On November 17, 2021, Baker's attorney received an email from "Assistant US Attorney (AUSA) Anita Eve—out of Philadelphia—stating, 'Your client will be charged within the week.'"
Two charges were projected in the email. Charge number one, "damaging federal property," he assumes for standing on a bench to film inside the Capitol. Standing on a bench falls under a statute that states it is illegal to stand on any piece of furniture in facilities like the Capitol. And charge number two, interstate racketeering.
Baker speculates that the racketeering charge is related in part to the small amounts of money he earned from selling his footage to Storyful and other outlets. In addition, his lawyers hypothesize the racketeering charge could be stretched to fit the idea that Baker "not only had foreknowledge of an illegal event that was going to take place in DC that day; but also that he must have colluded with others in that foreknowledge, and would then cross state lines for the purpose of profiting from an illegal event."
While Baker knows the racketeering charge is a serious one, he says it is "hilarious on its face considering that the FBI to the Capitol Police and to all the other agencies—all seem to have had an intelligence failure on leading up to and on January 6 but little Steve Baker, an independent journalist from Raleigh, NC, knew what was going to happen?" Sadly, in light of the information that has come out in the J6 convictions, his hypotheses are believable.
Angered by the November 17th email, Baker sent a few shots over the bow himself. He and his attorneys sent out on November 22, 2021, "approximately 200 press releases to all manner of media sources, stating that I—an independent journalist—was about to be prosecuted for nothing more than the act of "journalism" on January 6." He told UncoverDC he set out "to tell the world that an independent journalist is being selectively prosecuted for the act of journalism and with the absurdity of Interstate racketeering charge on top of that."
Then, said Baker, "At approximately 1:00 pm that same day (November 22), AUSA Eve sent my attorney a copy of that press release, stating, "We're not happy about this." He responded, asking, "Are you saying my client should forego his 1st Amendment right because he is being persecuted by the federal government?"
Her reply? "Oh no, not that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm just concerned that whoever the judge is that's assigned to his case is not going to look favorably upon this. As if she was really concerned about that. Yeah, right," added Baker.
The events in the fall put Baker more firmly in the government's crosshairs for better and worse. After November 22, 2021, the phone began to ring off the hook. He was contacted by Sen. Ron Johnson, asking how he could help. He began communicating with Congress members and their staffers, House Admin, House Oversight, and Jim Jordan's Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
Following the events of Fall 2021, Baker and his attorneys had not heard a word from the government until last Friday when he was alerted by the government about the incoming Grand Jury subpoena.
Even though Baker has been very public with everything, his work with various governmental parties seems to have raised ire among the anti-Whistleblower crowd. They know Baker is one of only five reporters to have been granted access to all J6 footage.
Baker is awaiting permission to view the footage again, but this time under revised guidelines that allegedly require equal access to the footage by the press. The new yet-to-be-released guidelines result from a lawsuit against the FBI and US Attorneys by a coalition of nine media companies. The media companies sued after House Speaker McCarthy gave Tucker Carlson exclusive access to 41,000 hours of J6 footage. To be clear, however, the public may never see footage from the Capitol Police. McCarthy pulled back on releasing some of the footage because the Capitol Police pushed back, claiming it would endanger the security of the Capitol grounds. Per Baker, the Capitol Police do not use body cams, so they "rely upon the 1700+ cameras of CCTV cams."
Baker appeared on the Tucker Carlson Show on March 21 to discuss J6 and the lopsided "political purge" of those whose narratives don't "comport" with the government's version of J6.
The DOJ and the FBI also know he has been talking with strategically important people. And they know he has been investigating several stories, one of which is explosive, using his comprehensive knowledge of the footage that has yet to be told. Coincidentally, before his interview on Tucker's show, Baker got a tip from a fellow journalist whose DOJ sources told him to tell Baker that "DC and the DOJ are not happy with the work he (Baker) is doing. "This story, says Baker, is "much bigger than I ever anticipated." He has already negotiated with a major media company to release the story when he ties it all together.
Charges Allegedly in the Works
Baker has not yet been charged. However, his attorneys have affirmed that the Grand Jury convened because of him, and charges may be coming. "Grand Juries," said Baker, "Don't handle misdemeanors. They handle felonies. So it looks like they are going to somehow try and create, manufacture, manipulate, and entrap me into a process crime or an obstruction of justice crime or something like that."
Baker shared one of the more chilling aspects of what he thinks the DOJ is strategizing behind the scenes:
"The government will try to invalidate my status as a journalist because I wasn't working for an agency." This strategy removes the privilege he enjoys because he is a journalist, effectively putting him in the same pot as every other J6 defendant. The government will make a case in that he "didn't enter the building with credentials." However, he also didn't behave the way other journalists did. Baker said:
"So we know that other independent journalists were there as journalists, but if they got caught up in the moment and they chanted "USA, USA" or "Whose house, Our house" or something like that, then they were convicted. Some have served serious prison time for doing nothing more than just opening their mouth while they were doing their active journalism.
I didn't do that, but I have been very, very vocal and very outspoken. I have attacked the government. When they first threatened me with prosecution, I went on the attack. They are not happy with me. They have a Burr under their saddle. They want to get me, and as you know, as the saying goes, you can get a Grand Jury, especially one in DC, to indict a ham sandwich.
But now that I am on the cusp of blowing this whole freaking thing open, that's why they turned their guns on me."
